Profiles in Geekdom: The Designer Behind Eightbit.me
EightBit.me founder and former Digg designer Addison Kowalski chats with GeekTech about Web design and music.
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Get started in augmented reality with Poistr
If we asked you to show us augmented reality, you’d likely fire up apps like Layar or Junaio, both leaders within the augmented reality space. But, what if we asked you to create some AR elements? Where would you start?
As this space grows, to remain relevant, it will be critical for business owners to be visible in the AR world and a new service called Poistr aims to simplify the entire process.
Poistr enables non-developers to create elements and points of interests that will be viewable using the Layar app, one of the world’s most popular AR browsers.
It works like this: Users begin by creating a “Layer” of information which can display a variety of elements in augmented reality including images, links to a website or a telephone number. To start creating the layer an address or specific location must be provided. If you were creating this layer for your business, you’d be able to input the venue’s address to trigger your elements within the Layar browser.
Users can create various objects within the layers coupled with a way to set the range of each action (the active range in meters your objects can be triggered). The intuitive interface for developing layers makes it easy to add videos, images and audio by simply giving Poistr the URL to the media file. Additionally, details about the location such as the telephone number, SMS, website URL and email address can be added.
Another cool feature of Poistr allows users to easily import multiple POIs or locations via KMZ files and GeoRSS (Coordinates from Google Maps). Alternatively as we’d mentioned, the address can be manually input as well.
Poistr is still in beta and it’s currently free. As it stands today, the layers are only viewable within the Layar browser (within Poistr’s demo layer) but it’s planning on extending the service to Junaio soon.
When the final version comes out, users will have the ability to publish their points of interest to Layar and Junaio and it will be viewable by anyone using the apps. Poistr appears to have a section for pricing however it hasn’t released any details as of yet.Image: Featured
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RIAA lobbyist becomes federal judge, rules on file-sharing cases
Last week, Washington, DC federal judge Beryl Howell ruled on three mass file-sharing lawsuits. Judges in Texas, West Virginia, and Illinois had all ruled recently that such lawsuits were defective in various ways, but Howell gave her cases the green light; attorneys could use the federal courts to sue thousands of people at once and then issue mass subpoenas to Internet providers. Yes, issues of “joinder” and “jurisdiction” would no doubt arise later, but the initial mass unmasking of alleged file-swappers was legitimate.
Howell isn’t the only judge to believe this, but her important ruling is especially interesting because of Howell’s previous work: lobbying for the recording industry during the time period when the RIAA was engaged in its own campaign of mass lawsuits against individuals.
The news, first reported in a piece at TorrentFreak, nicely illustrates the revolving door between government and industry. And it reminds us just how complicated questions of influence can be.
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